One a.m.

"This is a good life," I whisper to myself. I'm not certain I always believe it, but tonight I think I do.

Stephen's DCTV shoot was today; I got up this morning and headed cross-town with Jeff for a taping of scenes for a live-action version of 'Code Monkey.' I tired rapidly in the latter half of the shoot, and was grateful when Stephen rearranged the shoot order to get the backing band (read: Jeff, among others) finished up.

Dinner was at 5:30 at Stephen and Misty's. We didn't get home until a little after four, and I suspected I was making an imprudent choice when I lay down for a nap, but I did it anyway.

I woke up nearly five hours later, and was grateful to learn that jeff had brought back some of Misty's soup for me. I ate it on the couch while re-watching a favorite TV episode with Jeff. We talked, absently, of our upcoming trip to Seattle. Of food. Of life in general.

Jeff went to bed hours ago, and I settled in with a book. Books are accessorized with felines in this household; Tenzing and Edmund both are attracted to the stillness and quietness they engender in 'their' humans. As a result, I've been pinned here for a few hours, turning pages amidst kitty bathing sessions that subsided, eventually, into the amusing, soft sounds of kitty snoring.

I'll sleep again soon. Probably within the hour. While I'm awake, and have barrelled my way through a great deal of Kushiel's Mercy tonight, the tiredness is still there. I feel it in the set of my shoulders and how my fingers seem to always rub my eyes a little harder than is absolutely necessary.

When we don't rest enough, mentally or physically, we can subsist on our reserves for a while. What is true of reservoirs is true of people; draw down more deeply than you replenish, and eventually you run dry.

I think perhaps I have played my game a little too close. Early this year I calculated what it would take for me to be able to do the two major trips we wanted to take this year. My workplace only allowed us to carry 120 hours of vacation time at once. I wrote out a spreadsheet and calculated exactly what I would need to make these trips work, and the answer was clear: no vacation time between January and July. None. The reward would be two extraordinary trips in one year: over a week each in Seattle and Hawaii.

I fly in about forty days; forty, the Old Testament way of saying "How long? We don't know exactly how long, but it was a while."

It is a good life. I am tired, and I am drawing hard on my reserves, but it is still a good life, and soon? Soon, there will be water, mountains, city, and sky. I will stare into the campfire I share with friends and it will have been worth it. Every moment.

For now, though, life is what it is.